Archaeology and material cultural heritage enjoys a particular status as a form of heritage that, capturing the public imagination, has become the locus for the expression and negotiation of regional, national, and intra-national cultural identities. One important question is: why and how do contemporary people engage with archaeological heritage objects, artefacts, information or knowledge outside the realm of an professional, academically-based archaeology? This question is investigated here from the perspective of theoretical considerations based on Yuri Lotman’s semiosphere theory, which helps to describe the connections between the centre and peripheries of professional archaeology as sign structures. The centre may be defined according to prevalent scientific paradigms, while periphery in the space of creolisation in which, through interactions with other culturally more distant sign structures, archaeology-related nonprofessional communities emerge. On the basis of these considerations, we use collocation analysis on representative English language corpora to outline the structure of the field of archaeology-related nonprofessional communities, identify salient creolised peripheral spaces and archaeology-related practices, and develop a framework for further investigation of archaeological knowledge production and reuse in the context of global archaeology.

OVERVIEWMOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) is one of the leading archaeological companies in the UK. It provides professional archaeological services and implements award-winning community engagement programs with a high-profile online presence. Its Facebook page is an important communication channel, serving the organization in raising public awareness, reaching the widest audiences, and engaging with the community. MOLA has developed a strategic approach to its archaeological communication on Facebook by ensuring regular updates of its research and by providing rich archaeological content aligned with media campaigns of the most notable archaeological excavations. This strategy helps the organization build a steady and engaged community of interest. The use of social networks for public engagement, the possibilities of rapid dissemination, and the challenges of ensuring sustainable online participation via social networks resonate with major concerns discussed by different researchers in the field. This review explores MOLA's Facebook page, seeking to showcase how the archaeological organization communicates through Facebook on a day-to-day basis and to reveal how Facebook users react to different kinds of archaeological content through measurable metrics.

Social network sites (SNS) have recently become an active ground for interactions on contested and dissonant heritage, on the heritage of excluded and subaltern groups, and on the heritage of collective traumatic past events. Situated at the intersection between heritage studies, memory studies, Holocaust studies, social media studies and digital heritage studies, a growing body of scholarly literature has been emerging in the past 10 years, addressing online communication practices on SNS. This study, an integrative review of a comprehensive corpus of 80 scholarly works about difficult heritage on SNS, identifies the profile of authors contributing to this emerging area of research, the increasing frequency of publication after 2017, the prevalence of qualitative research methods, the global geographic dispersion of heritage addressed, and the emergence of common themes and concepts derived mostly from the authors ‘home’ fields of memory studies, heritage studies and (digital) media studies.

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